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Tag Archives: Indian Wars

I had time for one moremovie before February’s streaming purge kicked in. This, my third choice, also creates a trilogy of postbellum posts, none of which are really about the years following the Civil War. The doubly-third film is The Salvation, a Danish-made Western.

The story is one we’ve seen before. Two brothers, veterans of the Schleswig-Holstein wars, come to the American Southwest to create a new life. After seven years establishing themselves in their adopted country, brother Jon sends for his wife and son to join him from Denmark. An incident that seemingly sprung from the family being in the wrong place in the wrong time turns out to be part of a conspiracy involving the town elders, an evil gang leader, and a shadowy corporation. This time, though, they messed with the wrong Dane. Mads Mikkelsen plays the reluctant hero whose battlefield skills empower him to take on all comers.

This film follows a pattern of European movie-making I’ve enjoyed recently. Although having a budget enhanced by government grants (Wikipedia estimates 10.5 million euros), these are still small projects by American standards. Some shaky CGI aside, though, this one stands up fairly well on its own merits. Mikkelsen has built a solid name for himself as action star and plays the vengeful victim à la Clint Eastwood. One notices a number of European accents among the supporting characters. This probably isn’t so strange historically (westward expansion was fueled by immigration), but does further betray a non-American production. Leading woman Eva Green (French actress who played Vesper Lynd* opposite hero Daniel Craig against Mikkelsen’s villain in Casino Royale) is helped along by her playing a mute character – she’s had her tongue cut out by Indians. Mikkelsen’s opposite is gang leader Henry Delarue, very well played by Jeffery Dean Morgan, whom I know best as Watchmen‘s Comedian.

All-in-all this was a decent movie, worth watching. I’m glad there are European filmmakers willing to augment Hollywood’s sequel-fest. This one is particularly well-suited to American audiences who might otherwise shy away from foreign productions. While the Danish characters occasionally speak to each other in their own language**, the vast bulk of the film is in good ole American English. It’s an action shoot-em-up, so the tension is mostly of the “how’s he going to get out of this one” variety. It’s not deep, but its what we expect from the genre.

So The Salvation is good, but I can’t call it great. With Netflix films, I always must struggle with their rating system. I’d give this one 3 1/2 stars, but that’s not an option. So is it 3 1/2, closer to 3 or 3 1/2, closer to 4? In this case it gets a “closer to 3” rating and I have a couple of specific issues. There is, of course, what I led off with. The story is a stock Western tale, done so often its not even worth trying to figure out what it copied. But while copying Shane can get you an entertaining Pale Rider, to create The Unforgiven, you have to have something unique to say. Yet even given the stock plot, in this case I found the story too depressing. Maybe it was me and what I was in the mood for, but at some point I was thinking that, while we’ve got to see our hero driven to seek vengeance, does that mean simply killing everyone?

A third strike comes from the portrayal of guns, an inability to do correctly seems endemic to Hollywood. Of course this isn’t exactly Hollywood – it’s a European production, filmed in a believably-American-looking South Africa. Nor it is it all that bad relative to other movies. Still, the one thing that got me was the use of rechambering lever actions to indicate the imminent threat of a shooting. The first time Mikkelsen finds discarded rifle, he wisely checks the chamber. So far so good. But as the film goes on, it seems like every encounter, nearly every shot fired, has to be preceded by ejecting a round and chambering a new one. At some point, I couldn’t take it any more.

Three stars.

The final area where I have some criticism and parting thoughts is the historical grounding of the film, of which there is little. Not that I would expect it. Everything to this point says action film, not historical drama. I also was required to learn a little Danish history to understand the backstory of the main characters, which is an added bonus. However, the key twist to the movie – the tie in to big oil – is way out of its historical context. The discovery of oil and the beginnings of its use for consumer goods is probably about right time-wise, its just in the wrong place. Oil was being extracted from Canadian Oil fields and, circa 1871, there was some oil harvesting occurring in the American northeast. A woman named Lyne Taliaferro Barret had even begun the effort to extract oil from her Texas land by this time, but she was still nearly 20 years out from completing her project. The idea that a sinister big-oil corporation could be driving the criminal activity in this film is a fevered 20-teens dream.

There was another historical bit, however, that got me to wondering, and on this one I don’t know the answers. A Western trope that pervades the genre is the small town taken over by a menacing bandit gang. In film, it is the quest of the hero to free the innocents by killing (or just running off) the bad guy that makes the story. While corruption and powerful criminal syndicates are all too common, now as well as in the past, how “realistic” is this story? Was this a feature of the post-Civil War west that even organized, but isolated, settlements would frequently fall victim to lawlessness and extortion? If that did indeed happen, was it more likely to have been tied to organized activity (Ranchers, Cattlemen, Railroads, Oilmen, etc.) or was it a form of petty warlordism rising in the wilderness? Something to think about.

Unlike this movie, which isn’t an occasion for deep thoughts. Enjoy the action. Enjoy the shootouts. Expect Mikkelsen to get his revenge in the end.

*Vesper Lynd appears in Casino Royale to manage the financing for Bond’s gambling venture. Eva Green’s character in The Salvation, The Princess (also Madeline), manages the money for Delarue’s crew. Coincidence? I think not.

**Jon’s wife and son, having just arrived from Denmark, speak no English. Said wife is played by Danish pop-star, Oh Land, who is also the money.

Hostiles showed up a year or two back, being pushed by Netflix streaming. It certainly looked like it had potential. Lead actors Christian Bale and Wes Studi tend to be impressive in much of what they do and the previews of the wide-open spaces of Western America looked beautiful. The story, on the other hand, raised suspicions. Bale plays a veteran frontier Indian fighter who is tasked to escort an old enemy, and Indian chieftain, from New Mexico to Montana. He objects, saying in his mind the Chief shouldn’t be allowed to live, much less return to his homeland to live free for the rest of his days. However, over his feelings and objections, he must escort Chief Yellow Hawk (Studi), safely across the wilderness.

In finally watching it, it felt like I had seen it before. In particular, Hostiles was similar to The Homesman, a 2014 film directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones with Hilary Swank. As tempting it might be to accuse Hostiles of borrowing, there may be more to it than that. The original script was found by the widow of screenwriter Donald Stewart, who died in 1999. For whatever reason Stewart had not shopped the script around anywhere and so it existence was unknown upon his death. When his wife moved houses, she found the script and contacted Scott Cooper to direct, based on what she liked from some of his earlier works. Cooper rewrote the script but shares the screenwriting credit with Stewart. Obviously Stewart could not have relied on any twenty-teens moves for inspiration, although Cooper may have.

It hardly seems like giving away the ending to tell it, but ultimately Bale’s Captain comes to appreciate and respect Yellow Hawk as a fellow veteran of the wars between their respective cultures. Along the way, we discover that heroes and villains come from all races and cultures and that, while we forgive “us” for what we condemn in “them”, in the end we have to live with ourselves.

The script and story also don’t seem to be inspired by real events. While taking place against the background of America 1892, there do not seem to be any real people or events behind this story. Instead, one assumes, the purpose is to reflect the struggles and animosities of the present day. Maybe, even, it is a warning to us about the evil that men can do, either on their own initiative or because they are “just doing their job.” In the end, though, it seems there is less to it than meets the eye. However, what meets the eye – the vast expanse of the American West and a handful of mounted soldiers traveling through it – it quite impressive indeed.

This weekend in the Wall Street Journal is a piece called Shall We Have Civil War or Second Thoughts? As I type this, the article appears to be available without a subscription, but that may well change before you manage to click on it.

Briefly, it leads in with some commentary on our fragmented politics today and, in particular, the racial component of identity politics. From there, the author brings up the career of his great-Grandfather, a cavalryman in the Civil War and in the Indian Wars across the Great Plains that followed. It then stumbles into the reference in the subtitle of the piece (“Some of my relatives joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. But they soon thought better of it.”) before wrapping it all up with the assertion that our current civil strife is but a continuation of the civil strife of generations past.

I read through it to the end because I found some of the historical references enlightening*. Getting all the way to the end, however, I had to wonder what the point of this was.

The opinion piece is a guest author filling in for Peggy Noonan’s column while she is on her summer vacation. My first thought was perhaps they couldn’t find any decent talent and they picked someone with what sounded like a solid idea, but without the writing skills to make good on it. A little later I went back and checked the bio of the author. It says, “Mr. [Lance] Morrow, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former essayist for Time.” In other words, an man who made his living through his writing.

It now occurs to me is that what I am seeing is one of the more pernicious effects of the current culture wars and the political correctness that surrounds them. We are now used to seeing writing that is overly, sometimes absurdly adherent to political correctness, as well as the counterpieces which take things to the other extreme. What this may be is the unseen effect of this warfare. The writer attempts to take his thoughts towards certain conclusions, but then backs off, knowing that finishing his thought – indeed actually drawing a conclusion – is bound to offend somebody and therefore could potentially damage or even end the career of a writer.

The article starts off with a reference to an old Lone Ranger joke, whose punch line is has Tonto responding to the Lone Ranger with “What do you mean ‘we?'” But the author can’t bring himself to repeat the joke, or even directly state what he thinks the joke means, either then (during the time of the Lone Ranger radio broadcasts) or now (when even using the name “Tonto” seems to risk accusations of racial bigotry).

As he meanders through his family tree, he seems to be on the verge of making various points about culture and racism, then versus now, but never quite makes them. Perhaps he felt if he stated outright what was hidden away in his head, it would bring upon him the racist epithet. Nobody wants that. So we all keep our inner thoughts to ourselves, just in case.

On the other hand, maybe he is just a terrible writer. I don’t know.

* The author makes reference to some of the problems his great-Grandfather had with duties and authority and contrasts this with another story: “On the other hand, I admired the style of his wife, my great-grandmother Ella Mollen Morrow. One night at the fort, when the colonel was away scouring the plains for Native Americans, she shot a would-be rapist dead with a Colt .44. The Army didn’t even bother to investigate the incident.”